Perry expert says back pain doomed his campaign

So what happened? How could a long-serving Texas governor with visions of the White House in his eyes fail so ignominiously? How did it all go wrong for Rick Perry?

Those are the questions Jay Root of the Texas Tribune seeks to answer in his aptly named e-book "Oops: A Diary of the Campaign Trail."

Root, who has covered Perry for years makes clear there's no simple answer to explain what James Carville described as the worst presidential campaign in American history, but there's one explanation that comes close: sleeplessness.

In Root's view, Perry's back surgery in early 2011 was much more serious than his campaign people let on, and the candidate was in constant pain on the campaign trail. (Perry refused to take painkillers.) The pain exacerbated a lifelong sleep problem, which left him almost dead on his feet during the 24/7 demands of a presidential campaign.

"The chronic lack of adequate rest seemed to get worse and worse as the schedule of events multiplied and the travel wore down," Root writes.

Even if Perry had slept like a baby for eight hours a night, the multitudinous gaffes, the infighting and feuding at the top and the candidate's woeful ill-preparedness would have been enough to doom the campaign. The "oops" moment from Rochester, Mich., perhaps the most memorable mistake in campaign history, was merely the coup de grace.

In present-tense diary fashion, Root chronicles the ill-fated presidential quest from the heady early days with Perry atop the polls and raising more money than Mitt Romney to the sad, chaotic end. "Dude, no matter how bad you've heard it was, it was 10 times worse," a senior campaign aide told Root toward the end.

"Oops" captures the craziness of it all in close-up detail. All campaigns are, in fact, crazy - for the candidate, for the handlers and staff, for dogged reporters like Root chasing the story from New Hampshire to South Carolina to Iowa to Florida and points in between. Rick Perry's quest was no "Making of a President," but as Root chronicles, it's one for the history books nonetheless.